1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a process where an operator may select a print folder application that can be run on existing electronic reprographic systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic reprographic systems, such as DocuTech, have the ability to accept jobs for printing and print individual jobs on demand. The jobs may be obtained by setting up job parameters at the User Interface (UI) and scanning in a physical set of original documents or a complete job may be sent to the printer system electronically via a local area network. Each job is defined by, among other things, a number of image pages in the job, how many prints of each image page are required (quantity selected) and a finishing selection for each collated or uncollated set of prints. The DocuTech system, for instance, has the ability to store many of these jobs in a job file. A job in the job file may be modified to change various job parameters, and individual jobs may be printed on demand. Each job in the job file is a separate entity, with no links to other jobs in the job file.
There are several realworld situations that may require some sort of link between jobs stored in an electronic reprographic system, however. The first such example is when books or manuals are being produced. In this case, different chapters of the book or sections of the manual may be created and maintained as separate documents. This may be necessary due to the need to divide the work among several people, or simply as a convenience to maintain several small documents rather than one large book. While the different chapters of the book or sections of the manual are individual documents, they are still conceptually linked together to form a single book or manual. The electronic reprographic systems of the prior art do not support this conceptual linking of individual documents.
A second example of the usefulness of job linkage is when a user wishes to print and distribute N copies of several, otherwise unrelated jobs in the system. This may occur if the user wishes to print copies of financial reports of several different departments, or copies of technical articles on a similar topic. In these cases, the individual jobs may be resident in the job file with different values for quantity selected or different finishing selections, since the jobs are otherwise unrelated. To distribute copies of these jobs, a user may want to elect a uniform finishing selection for all jobs and a uniform quantity to print without disturbing the base jobs.
Thus, without a method of logically linking jobs in the job file together, an operator who wants to create X copies of Y different sets (either for distribution or when the Y sets are chapters in a book or manual) is forced to use the following labor intensive procedure:
1) modify each required job in the job file to change the number of prints (quantity selected) to the uniform number X, and to change the finishing selection so that all Y jobs have the same finishing selection; PA1 2) copy each of the Y jobs to the print queue (print all of the jobs); and PA1 3) manually collate the resulting X sets of Y jobs.
Obviously, for large values of X and Y the labor costs of this method become exorbitant.